The Three Marys of Happiness

I know one or two things. Sadly, neither of them are about happiness, so I gotta give it my best shot here and hope I come even remotely close to something neat. Then again everyone wants happiness, regardless of how it is actually defined, and so everyone thinks about it and therefore has some fairly universal ideas of what it really is. For now I have three ideas that I hope to go into some detail about, even if presently I'm not too sure of what I'll say. I do know this though – if happiness really exists, then it is ever-fleeting. One minute you have a lot of it, the next minute it's all gone and replaced by a piano hanging over your head. For that reason, my takes on happiness might be fairly practical, or at least practical happiness is the only kind I ever had access to in my life, that is, at least assuming it's not the only kind of happiness that exists... Whatever the proper truth may be, of one thing I am safely convinced – happiness is not a spiritual, ethereal thing that you are, it's merely a physical state that you're sometimes in.

That may not sound all that pretty, but hopefully it's a state that you're in for a long, long time. Or maybe I'm fairly wrong and happiness really is a deep thing, a spiritual thing, a thing of the beyond. In my old age I come to find more and more things about which I hope to be wrong, and this might be one of them, all things considered. But anyway, my three theories of happiness, as I see it now, are the following, in no particular order.

3. Solving a problem and enjoying the free time until a new problem comes along.

Sometimes I need to go to the dentist and it's annoying as all hell. It ruins my day, maybe even my week, it costs me money, it leaves me anxiously running my tongue across the problem tooth, it causes this and that and that and this. But then I go to the dentist, I fix the tooth, and when I come home, assuming it's all done and dusted and polished, I realize I'm good to go, and at least for the rest of the week, I'm happy... The dragon has been vanquished, and at least for a while now I can relax and even celebrate a little.

But of course it doesn't last, in fact, it wears off something fierce. But it makes sense that happiness would be this self-flagellating thing as it relates to its opposite, same as pleasure relates to pain, and light relates to dark, and so on. The idea of permanent happiness being seen as an absence of problems doesn't seem to last, we quickly make that absence into a new standard that, if it continues, it breeds a kind of cold neutrality that at best leads to numbness. And just like going to the dentist if you don't floss, as soon as that bit of gunk comes off in the blast, your gums will bleed.

All in all it turns into a funny thing, how nobody wants problems but it's in solving them that we gain a sense of meaning and of having achieved something, at least temporarily. When it wears off a new problem comes up, a new errand to run, and when it's gone and solved we can sigh and reward ourselves, kinda like eating a slice of chocolate cake after you've worked out. It sounds halfway decent but the underlying assumption of this problem theory is the kind of Dostoyevsky idea that even in paradise we humans would be unhappy eventually, and we'd find a way to ruin it just to kill the ensuing boredom. Happiness therefore, is precisely that time wedged in between a problem and its solution.

2. Having things to do tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Maybe people are a little bit like sharks, we can't stop still for long otherwise our minds go out of whack faster than our gills. Similarly to the previous point, having something to do is the key to happiness, although it's maybe a more practical version of it, definitely not something so pretty. It's not so much about problems per se, but it is the case that having goals to accomplish, having objectives to tick off your list, maybe that is a road to happiness, or maybe happiness is the road itself. To have nothing to do, to have no errand list with many-a thing to cross off, that is what soon breeds boredom, and boredom soon breeds nihilism.

In a way it's like a video game. You boot up the game and you play it a ton, doing quests, missions, exploring locations, acquiring items, and so on, and if you're anything like me you go through it fast because you're wanting to “get done with that stuff” so you can finally play the game. Thing is, playing the game after most things have been completed isn't a lot of fun. It's senseless, you have nothing left to do in it, there's no longer any point in playing because playing is just pressing buttons, not necessarily doing things. So you soon get bored with it all, you shut it off and leave it for a while. And next time you boot it up again, that damn perfect save file is just gonna get deleted in favor of a fresh one, full of a new adventure.

Likewise in life some people can't stay still. Even right now I'm eager to finish this article plus two more I wanna get done, and the mental planning I can do about it now busies me but it also fuels me, or perhaps because it busies me it fuels me. I want to be done with them as soon as possible so that I can do other things, but I also wanna be done with those things as soon as possible so I can do other-other things, and so on and on until I reach that blissful paradise. Thing is, like with the video game example, that paradise doesn't exist, and as such we're all better off having many things to do, many errands to run, even if just to not think about anything else for as long as those things last... In essence then, to stay still is to allow your mind to run, and because it often runs to undesirable places, you might be better off staying as busy as you can.

1. Being carefree, and possibly an idiot.

If the previous two options fail, there's always the best and happiest option of all – not caring. Maybe it's a fake thing, or rather it's bound to be a fake thing in at least some respects, but it often seems as though some idiots, and I use the word with all the love in the world, were simply born to be happy. Their apparent capacity to not care about things leaves them in an altogether blissful state of existence. For example, a man drives past in a fancy car and they aren't eager and envious for material things, a strikingly beautiful woman walks past in fancy heels and they aren't eager and envious for pleasures of the flesh, someone says do and another person does it and they aren't eager and envious for power and control. In a nutshell they seem to simply not care, like a fish in the river, merely going along wherever the current takes them. Or maybe the analogy fails me and it's not so much that they are fish, and maybe instead it's more as if they are themselves the water, they are the pond, perfectly still, unmoving except by the ripples formed by a soft breeze. And even should a pebble fall in the water, the idiot just takes it quietly until the waters lie still once again, like a rain puddle on a sunny winter morning.

I suppose in a world of woes, the idiot is king. To simply not care about things, to be content with whatever comes naturally, to go through life as a sheet of paper blowing in the wind, maybe only that is happiness. It only remains to be seen how accurate this idea really is, how the carefree man isn't merely hiding his own worries with such good acting that we can't help to be surprised at his talents. Then again, maybe the acting IS the carefree attitude, maybe there's nobody in this world who can truly not care, maybe our woes and worries are inevitable, but acting as though they don't matter is the road to happiness. It's as if we're all desperately avoiding thinking about elephants, and meanwhile there's this happy-go-lucky fella who don't even know what an elephant is. Or maybe he does know but he's built in such a way as to simply not care about it... He just don't give a damn.

Then again maybe to not care is impossible, maybe the world does show you all these great things at one time or another and you're forced to wonder, and by wondering you feel envious, and by feeling envious you feel unhappy. And because we always need a new objective to accomplish in order to feel happy, we're always envious of those who have more than us, just like we are often blind to those who have less... And so now I'm left with a bitter irony that not only am I envious of men who have more than me, not only am I envious of the many things in this world I'll never have, but I'm also envious of men I see as stupider, and maybe therefore happier and more carefree than me. This can only be because, at the end of the day, the whole thing is a rat race, and I myself have no bleeding clue about what happiness really is. All I'm at least somewhat certain about is that my temptation to add the word “true” before the word “happiness” in the previous sentence is a temptation I'm better off resisting because there almost certainly isn't any such thing.

Stay happy.

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